Chapter4

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Motivating Students to Take Control of Their Reading


Themes and Messages:

Reading is not a magic skill that you either have or do not have. Reading is an ongoing process of problem solving, and some of the problems posed by a text are greater than others. Students need to be supported into understanding this concept and moving from viewing reading as an all-or-nothing, succeed-or-fail proposition to seeing reading development as an ongoing process.

Students will do almost anything in order to avoid feeling humiliated in front of or revealing what they perceive to be their own inadequacies in front of their peers. They need a lot of support in order to share their confusion and questions about the texts that they read.

Typical adolescent self-absorption can be redirected into getting students to think about their own reading processes. They should be reading with their minding, or engaging in metacognition.

Unless students develop their own authentic reasons for reading, there is very little chance that anything they learn in an Academic Literacy course will have a lasting impact.

Students who have little or no experience reading for pleasure are less fluent, motivated, and confident when tackling assigned text than those who have enjoyed reading on their own.

Good readers are intelligent and discriminating; they give a text a chance, but if it doesn't meet their interest or their needs, they trade it in for something that will.

The most important feature of a good classroom library is that it have enough variety in topics, genres, and reading levels to appeal to the full range of classroom readers. It should include fiction and nonfiction texts about topics that are of interest to the students in the classroom. Teachers can find affordable books in used book stores, flea markets, and thrift shops, and can also obtain books through book drives.

SSR can fail if certain conditions for success are not met. Teachers must understand and be convinced of its value. They should understand how to help students identify good reading choices and should be able to provide them with choices. Teachers should sent up an accountability system for SSR, and students should share their books with one another.

Students can be caught strategies for dealing with and eliminating distractions while reading. They can learn to develop control over their thinking.


Key Questions for School Librarians:

How can the library support student motivation and teachers' specific goals and instruction related to reading motivation?

Does the library come across as a safe place for student to discuss their questions and confusion with reading?

How can the library or media center emphasize or express the relationship between literacy and society?

How does the library support or market the importance of and process of SSR?

Does the library collection include a variety of nonfiction and fiction books about topics that interest students that students can use for SSR? Are they arranged in ways that they will be easy for students to access?



Strategies:

Thinking aloud about confusing texts
  • Have students bring texts to class that they feel confident reading but that might confuse the teacher. (Ex: song lyrics, poems, computer manuals)
  • The teachers should try to make sense of the materials by thinking aloud (verbalizing their process of trying to make sense of texts) in front of the class.
  • After modeling thinking aloud, teachers should have students practice thinking aloud about texts that they find confusing.
Students will see that successful reading requires an understanding of how language is used differently and conveys different content in different contexts. They will also be reminded that they may have more reading expertise than they thought they did.


Focus on Metacognition
  • Define and frame metacognition in a way that students will understand, using any number of metaphors/examples.
  • When discussing texts, ask students questions about how they read: "How do you know when your understanding is breaking down?" "Can you point to certain places in a text where you tend to 'lose it'?" "How do you get back on track when you begin to notice that you are 'not getting it'?"
  • Provide students with a handout for ideas about what to do when they find themselves confused while reading a text:
    • Ignore the unclear part and read on to see if it gets clearer
    • Reread the unclear part
    • Reread the sentence(s) before the unclear part
    • Try to connect the unclear part to something you already know.


Explore the relationship between literacy and society
  • Have students read excerpts from autobiographies, poetry, and fiction in which the authors addressed the why read question.
  • Have students discuss how reading has enriched these peoples' lives.
  • Possibly have students role play conversations in which the various authors or their characters discuss why they read.
  • Choose texts from a diverse group of authors so that ethnically diverse students can read testimonies from people with whom they identify (Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Malcolm X, Rudolpho Anaya -- see Unit One outline in Appendix A for a full list)
  • As students read each text in the unit, have them add to a chart that they create individually describing how the author or character might answer the question "why read?"


Consider other struggling readers
  • Have students read testimonials from people who struggle with reading. (There is an excellent example from a fifteen-year-old on pp. 61-62)
  • Have students respond by writing a letter to the struggling reader and offer advice.
Students will relate to the reader's feelings of inadequacy, and writing out explicit advice for his problems with reading will help them to internalize the information that they are learning in the course.


Dialogue between a nonreader and a reader (p. 63)
  • Set up this situation: A student who only likes books about serial killers and someone such as Malcolm X or other authors from the unit or another student who has overcome a struggle with reading, are sitting at a table in a library reading. All of a sudden the fan of serial killer books slams his book down and says, "I hate reading!"
  • Explain to students that they will be writing a two-page dialogue in which the person who now likes to read talks to this student about how to note hate reading so much.
  • Have students read their dialogues aloud with a partner.


Giving Books the Ten-Page Chance
  • If a book captures a student's interest by the time he or she has read the first ten pages, he or she should keep reading.
  • If after ten pages the student doesn't like the book, he or she should stop and find another one, either on his/her own or with the help of a friend, parent, or teacher.
  • If, at the end of ten pages, the student isn't sure what to think of the book, he or she should consider giving it another ten-page chance.
Students will come to understand that they can choose what to read and what to not read when they engage in pleasure reading. Abandoning a book in that context is not the sign of a poor reader; it shows that students are intelligent, discriminating readers.


SSR (explicit instructions on page 65, 68-69)
  • See chapter 3 strategies.


Give students explicit strategies for controlling their concentration:
  • Read about how the brain works --specifically attention and concentration. (Keeping a Head in School is a book about how the brain works that is written for young people)
  • Read and discuss the Concentration Cockpit (Figure 4.1, page 72), and discuss the different kinds of control that can and should be developed.
  • Have students write a letter to the teacher describing his or her own strengths and weaknesses in paying attention while reading.
  • Have students develop a plan for regaining lost focus while reading, focusing on their own particular distractions (daydreaming, plans after school, etc.)
  • Remind students to look back at these plans over the course of the year.







NOTES ON THE CHAPTER:


Academic Literacy program would not work without students' active participation. The teacher needed the students to tell them what was going on in their minds when they were reading--where they got stuck, what was confusing, what seemed easy and what did not.

They had to create the sense that students and teacher formed a community of readers committed to a collaborative inquiry aimed at improving their reading.

Students had to feel that it was not only okay, but actually cool to be part of that community.


The teachers repeatedly made the point that all people, regardless of where they are in their lives, encounter texts that are easy for them to understand and texts that confound them. Reading is not a magic skill that you either have or do not have. Reading is an ongoing process of problem solving, and some of the problems posed by a text are greater than others.

The teachers gave students terms and definitions for academic literacy students--metacognition, schema, engagement, fluency, competency, text, chunking, strategy, summarizing, and paraphrasing (p. 55)

Students liked knowing that what they were doing would make a difference in their reading according to the experts in the field.

Students will do almost anything in order to avoid feeling humiliated in front of or revealing what they perceive to be their own inadequacies in front of their peers.

The teachers emphasized the value of talking about the things in the text that were confusing, and they awarded extra credit to students for sharing their confusion and questions. (The more explicit the students were, the more credit they got.)

The teachers had students bring texts to class that they felt confident reading and understanding but the teachers might not. The results were mostly song lyrics. This helped students understand that language is used different and conveys different content in different contexts.


The teachers asked students to define reading, and the students replied that it was saying the words you see when you look at a page with words.

the teachers responded by asking whether a person who could say all the words on a page but could not tell you anything about what he had read had really read the page.

Reading with your mouth vs. reading with your mind ---- reading involves mental processes of which a reader can be explicity aware and therefore can control --- METACOGNITION


Adolescents are often self-absorbed --- this tendency can be redirected into getting them to think about their own reading processes. (See strategies.)


Students need to develop their own authentic reasons for reading in order to effectively change their relationship with reading into a more positive one that they can maintain after leaving the academic literacy class.

The teachers had the students explore the relationship between literacy and society.

The teachers had a discussion with students about how literacy related to their life goals of happiness, success, money, etc.

They had students read about and consider the experiences of unmotivated or struggling readers. Students read a testimony from a fifteen year old student who struggles with reading and wrote letters in response where they talking about the efforts that they had to make in order to understand texts and offered suggestions.

Struggling with reading became a problem that they could work on together, rather than their own private shame.


If students are encouraged to try out the role of a more confident reader addressing others who might have reminded them of themselves, (see dialoge between a nonreader and a reader strategy), they make an important shift in their identities as readers. They begin to internalize the notion that, although most people can read certain types of texts quite competently, they may have great difficulty reading other types. Students will move from seeing reading as an all-or-nothing, succeed-or-fail proposition to seeing reading development as an ongoing process. They will feel more hopeful about improving their own reading.



the teachers focused not only on how reading would contribute to students' future success in the academic and work worlds, but also on how it could give students pleasure. Many students had little/no experience reading anything other than what was required for class. Some had never really liked to read, othrs had stopped in middle school.

Students with no experience reading for pleasure would be less fluent, motivated, and confident when tackling assigned text than those who had enjoyed reading on their own. These students needed to hear how friends, teachers, and other people htey knew choose books. They needed to become familiar with popular authors and with different types of books that might appeal to them.

The teachers spent time talking about where to find books and how to choose among them and asked students to keep a list of different ways to choose books.


Students had difficult concentrating during SSR at first, but soon they were able to read for longer and began sharing books and suggesting authors to their classmates. They eventually elected to devote an entire 100-minute block to SSR, and they stayed engaged the whole time.


In addition to developing students' sense of what they liked to read and building up their stamina and fluency, the teachers worked on increasing students' ability to control their reading processes and concentration.